The demand for increasingly smaller devices has posed a number of challenges at least in terms of manufacturing, particular to the various photolithographic operations generally needed for patterning high-density features. Forming high-density metal lines and islands for memory devices, for example, may be limited by the optical resolution capabilities of photolithographic exposure tools. Although there exist advanced photolithography tools that employ reduced wavelengths and have high numerical aperture values, these factors may still be insufficient to effect onto a photoresist layer the required exposure for producing the desired feature density and/or size. Accordingly, effectively patterning high-density and high aspect ratio features is of substantial importance.